At least 13 people were killed and five injured in a sectarian attack in Pakistan’s southwestern city of Quetta on Saturday morning, a media report said.
The attack took place at about 8 00 am. When two gunmen riding a motorcycle opened indiscriminate fire at a vehicle carrying people from the Hazara Shia community on their way for work near a bus stop on the Spini road in a densely populated area of the city, Xinhua reported citing local media reports.
The gunmen escaped after the firing. The injured were shifted to the Bolan Medical Complex in the city.
The incident is the second in the city in 12 hours. Late Friday night, seven Shia devotees were reportedly shot dead in Quetta while they were heading to Iran to visit religious places.
The banned extremist group “Lashkar-e-Jhangvi” had claimed responsibility for the Friday’s attack on the Shia devotees. A spokesman of the group Ali Sher Haidri said that it was the revenge of the murder of Sunni scholar Maulvi Karim who was killed in Quetta in firing on Thursday.
Quetta, capital city of the insurgency-hit Balochistan province bordering Iran and Afghanistan to its west, has seen a series of bomb blasts, sectarian and target killings in recent weeks. Also on Friday, two people including a nephew of Balochistan’s chief minister Aslam Raisani, were killed and nearly 30 were injured in a bomb attack outside a football stadium in Mastung, some 60 km south of Quetta.